Dental Care – In a New Light

It is said that about 47% people tend to notice a person’s smile first when they meet someone. Where west is much aware and alert about their oral health, it is yet quite neglected in India, to an extent. If you feel happy about brushing twice a day, please note that there’s more to dental health and hygiene than brushing twice a day or avoiding sweet food stuff.

Fact You Must Know

An amazing fact that’s not commonly known is that, almost 90% of diseases show their early signs in the mouth including diabetes and HIV. According to the national oral health survey conducted in 2003-04, 85% adults and 53% children in India suffer from dental problems and only 2% of our population goes for regular dental checkups.

Do you take a bath when a vaccination is due? If your answer is NO, then be noted that brushing your teeth is just equivalent to taking a bath.

Good news for those fed up of brushing twice! Interestingly, brushing only once is also good enough provided you keep your teeth clean by rinsing properly after every intake of food.

So, sweet lovers eat as much of sweets as you want. Just remember, rinse so well your mouth that no sweets or food remain stuck in your mouth. Teeth decay when food sticks to the teeth and stay there.

How to locate Dental Problem

For most of us, pain is the only dental problem, where the fact is that pain is a ticking alarm indicating another serious and greater problem. Just like if an alarm doesn’t go off, you don’t realize it’s time to wake up, the same way if there’s no pain you don’t realize it’s time to get dental treatment.

Pain arises in the final stages of tooth decay when the caries reaches the tooth pulp (where all the nerves and blood vessels reside). The early stages are painless, hence go undetectable and can be identified only at the time of a dental checkup. Most of the times, pus has already accumulated by the time the tooth starts hurting.

Blame This Most Commonly Growing Disease

Most common dental problem in India is Gingivitis. It is the infection of the gums, commonly known in layman terms as “Pyria”. It is caused by heavy staining and presence of calculus deposits. It is a serious condition as it leads to loss of the bone holding the tooth. All those people losing their teeth in 40s and 50s, have suffered from this disease.

This is not what you want to look like for sure. So, Read On!

When teeth are unclean, it leads to accumulation of plaque, which hardens to form calculus. Calculus causes infection in the gums and the harmful microorganisms living in the calculus causes gum recession. After the gums recede, the bacteria starts causing bone loss. When the bone holding the teeth gets weak the teeth start to move and ultimately fall out.

Still Thinking?

There are a lot of things about dentistry that people don’t know about, and we can’t really blame them as there isn’t really any proper source of information except the TV commercials. Ideally people should go for a dental checkup regularly to prevent any dental problem from manifesting into a bigger problem but awareness is a huge issue in our country and need too.

Dr. Ankit Jha is a dental graduate from Manipal University. He runs a startup, DentAmigo, where he and his team conduct dental awareness and checkup camps at various places in Delhi NCR to raise awareness towards dentistry and it's ailments.
Recently his company has started a charitable dental clinic in association with an NGO in East Delhi where he is currently practicing.